Satish Kumar Quotes

A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.

Civilization can never be sustainable.

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

We treat this world of ours as though we have a spare in the trunk.

We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it.... That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago.

The message from all quarters is the same: our undisciplined consumption must end. If we continue to gobble up our resources without any regard to stewardship and to spew out our deadly wastes over land, sea, and air, we may well be drawing down the final curtain upon ourselves.

Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

The planet's resources are rare; we must consume more ethically and equitably.

We've raped our homelands to maintain our economies.

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

Every time there is an economic intensification, there is an ecological impact.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated